What’s the news from the MEF community? Here’s your weekly round up of all the latest announcements from MEF members including product launches, partnerships, research insights and more…
ForgeRock reveals new connected car ID partners
AGL, Renesas and IoT.bzh have signed up with ForgeRock to make connected cars more secure.
The partners will create trusted authentication systems for Vehicle-to-X, Vehicle-to-Cloud (V2C), Vehicle-to-Vehicle (V2V), and Vehicle-to-Infrastructure (V2I) scenarios.
ForgeRock CTO Lasse Andresen said: “The typical connected car will include over 100+ million lines of code, with innumerable points of exposure. Providing a safe driving experience will require concerted efforts from developers, cloud providers, manufacturers, application providers and more. We’re delighted to be working with AGL, Renesas, and IoT.bzh to make the secure connected car a reality.”
Route Mobile acquires Call 2 Connect
India’s Route Mobile will strengthen its payment capablities with the purchase of compatriot company Call 2 Connect.
The latter company provide customer support solutions in payments including voice, non-voice and back office processing.
Rajdip Gupta, Group CEO, Route Mobile Limited, said: “The customer centric approach of both companieswill help us strengthen our relationships with global telco partners, helping them to safeguard their investments, reduce their costs and ultimately create the stable business environments they are looking for.”
The buyout follows Route Mobile’s earlier acquisitions of Cellent Technologies and Defero Mobile.
Twilio unveils Proxy customer care APIs
Cloud comms specialist Twilio has announced Twilio Proxy, a new API to power private text and voice conversations between customers and mobile workers.
It means any mobile worker can use their own device to talk to customers, yet stay safe and private.
Twilio Proxy is part of the newly-announced Twilio Engagement Cloud, a family of Declarative APIs for businesses that want to use cloud communications to stay in touch with customers.
Jeff Lawson, Twilio CEO, said: “As the demands on a developer’s time grows, one of our goals is to build new APIs that free up developers to focus on the more creative aspects of coding. We can’t wait to see what developers build next using these new APIs!”
Universal Music Group and Tencent sign landmark licensing agreement
China’s Tencent will include UMG music on its streaming platforms QQ Music, KuGou and Kuwo.
The digital giant will also become UMG’s master distribution and licensing partner in China. Both parties will develop new artists and business models, while enforcing copyright protection.
In China, Tencent provides over 17 million songs to 600 million monthly active users, with more than 15 million paying subscribers.
Michael Nash, EVP of Digital Strategy at UMG, said: “The digital opportunity in China’s music market is truly extraordinary. Chinese consumers are clearly embracing licensed services.”
Gemalto: Half of people will make the phone their ID in 2025
48 per cent of consumers expect to use their smartphones as their primary form of ID in eight years’ time, says a new study from Gemalto.
The research also revealed that 77 per cent believe they will manage their own digital identities, while 22 per cent believe telcos will take this on, and 24 per cent expect ‘large companies like Amazon’ to do it.
Remi de Fouchier, Gemalto VP of marketing for mobile services and the internet of things (IoT), said: “The next round of innovations in the mobile world – from integration with IoT devices to using smartphones as ID – will be key to how all industry stakeholders shape the future of mobile customer experience management.”
Samba TV chooses SpotX for targeted advertising
Advertisers on Samba TV can now buy across its connected inventory, both programmatically and traditionally, thanks to SpotX.
Samba TV’s content ID technology is integrated into millions of smart TVs to give real-time viewership data and insights.
Thanks to this partnership, this data will be available via SpotX’s ad serving platform. That will help more than 50 publishers and advertisers to target specific audience segments.
“We’re pleased to partner with Samba TV to offer access to data-rich audience segments,” said Jeremy Straight, SVP, Strategic Partnerships at SpotX.
Mobile malware attacks up 3x in a quarter
Mobile ransomware is at epidemic levels, says a new report from Kaspersky Lab.
It found the number of ransomware files detected reached 218,625 during Q1, compared to 61,832 in the previous quarter. And it said ”Trojan-Ransom.AndroidOS.Fusob.h” accounted for nearly 45 per cent of all attacks.
“People need to bear in mind that attackers can try to block access to their data not only on a PC but also on their mobile device,” said Roman Unuchek, Senior Malware Analyst at Kaspersky Lab.
Kaspersky detected and repelled 480m malicious attacks, 1.3m malicious installation packages and 32,038 mobile banking Trojans in the quarter.
PubMatic beefs up its Prebid.js tools
Mobile ad specialist PubMatic has expanded its Prebid.js with OpenWrap – a solution that helps publishers improve their header bidding strategies.
Prebid.js is an open-source container script, which has access to over 70 demand partners and hundreds of DSPs. OpenWrap will give publishers access to this cohort while eliminating the need for them to make tradeoffs.
“Publishers no longer need to choose between growing monetization today with client-side integrations and preparing for a future where auctions will transition to the server-side,” said Evan Simeone, SVP of product management at PubMatic.
